I have selected some really nice ones, all are free of course and have email subscription form so you can integrate with MailChimp following the tutorial. Here they are:

Coming Soon Splash Page CSS3

It cannot go any simpler than this. Just drop in your logo, place some text, put a link of your Twitter, it is ready to go.

Counter – Coming Soon Page

For you who have something to showcase already, Counter is a great choice. Built with Bootstrap and Revolution Slider, it will amaze your audience even before your site is launched!

Glassy – A shiny way to say “Coming Soon”

Similar as above, a nice responsive page with image slider. A better option if you prefer a shiny instead of flat look.

HTML5 and CSS3 Minimal Coming Soon Page

Prefer to understand how the page is built instead of just diving into the code? This post shows how it was done.

PaperLaunch – Free “Under Construction” Template

This nice and fully featured template has everything you ever need to create a coming soon page in minutes. It even includes the PSD files and Ajax Subscribe Form!

More Options

Have not found the template you are looking for from the ones above? Well you cannot be really picky for free stuff, right? If you are willing to spend $3-10 to save a lot of your time from custom design and coding, ThemeForest has lots of great templates too. Check them out under their Coming Soon & Under Construction Template category.

The post 5 Clean and Free Coming Soon Page Templates with Email Subscription Form appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

…think of it as “anything that isn’t bulk“. Basically, it is email sent to an individual based on some action.

In my own words related to e-commerce, transaction emails are all notification emails sent out by your e-commerce/shopping cart platform related with a customer’s account or order activities such as:

• Account creation welcome email
• Password reminder/reset instructions
• Order confirmation/invoice
• Order status update
• Shipping tracking number
• Order review request, etc

By default, if you host your e-commerce platform on your own server, most likely these emails are sent directly using the server’s built-in mail application like sendmail on Apache/PHP environment. If you have this running then all is good, but what if you can make it even better? By using 3rd-party transaction email provider, you send out these emails through their server. Usually communication between your server and theirs is done through APIs or SMTP.

Benefits

Why is it better? There are additional features that you can gain from using a separate server/service to send our your transactional email:

Higher rate of deliverability

Even if you have a very good and clean server, there is still a possibility that your server’s IP to get rejected by certain ISPs (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) when they feel that too many emails coming from the same origin. Like email SaaS, transactional email services most likely have a farm of servers with multiple IPs that has been optimized to get maximum acceptability across different ISPs.

Additional insights of your email activities

You now have the options to track the numbers of bounced emails, open rates and click rates just like when you are sending your newsletter email campaigns. While the accuracy of this not 100%, you can only track open rate if the customers’ email readers supports HTML, it is still a valuable additional insight. Let’s say you see that the open rate for your invoice emails is very low, probably the subject is not clear enough and you can make an improvement on it.

Create additional rules

Customers occasionally enter wrong email address in their order details which may result the notification emails never get delivered to them. By setting a simple rule like to notify you when an email gets bounced, you can then check the cause and email address, and if possible correct it before the customer contacts you regarding his order.

Services Compared

There are few services that offer to send transactional emails. There are typically 2 types of pricing:

1. Monthly plan
   You pay a flat monthly fee and you will be given a quota of number of emails that can be sent within that cycle.
2. Pay-as-you-go
   You pay based on the number of emails or credits that you have sent out within that month.
3. Buy bulk credits
   You buy a bundle of credits where it will be subtracted every time you send out an email.

Honestly I cannot rate each of the services’ quality and features, as in the context of e-commerce applications we are not using the features or APIs too extensively. For now, I only compare them based on pricing and compatibility with most popular self-hosted shopping cart platforms, Magento and OpenCart.

Price starts from	$9.95 per month – 40,000 credits	$1.50 per 10,000 emails	Free for first 12,000 emails in a month	Free for first 6,000 emails in a month
Magento integration	documented	plugin	MagentoConnect extension	plugin
OpenCart integration	via SMTP	via SMTP or PHP class	extension ($10)	via SMTP
Website	sendgrid.com	postmarkapp.com	mandrill.com	mailjet.com

If you have experience using different transactional email services for your online store, please share it here.

The post Using Transactional Email Service for Your E-Commerce Platform appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

What is spam? Quoting from Wikipedia:

Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, especially advertising, indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media.

I particularly find the word indiscriminately to be spot on. You are not expecting it, decide not to receive it anymore, or whatever other reason, but you cannot stop it from keep getting into your inbox. Even if you have a legitimate business and only send one or two emails a year with “hard to resist” offers without giving your customers to opt-out from your list, to me that is spamming.

Some countries have created laws to regulate these types of advertising by requiring any type of business or person to put an unsubscribe link in their promotional emails. Unfortunately for many businesses which base of operations are in countries that do not have local rules that enforce it yet, they feel that it is not required. The main reason is mostly because they do not want to loose their potential market and believe they have nothing to loose. Well, I beg to differ. There are risks involved, which I am going to explain below.

Getting your email and IP addresses banned

By not allowing your recipients to unsubscribe, you are increasing the chance of them to mark the email as spam and it will go to their junk mail inbox instead. Note that when anybody marks an email as spam, the email service provider will also log its sender email address and IP. When it receives too many complaints from the same sender, it can put your email or IP address into a blacklist and you cannot send to all customers that use that email service anymore. Imagine if 30% of your customers use Gmail and your server is banned by them, that will be a big loss.

Cost efficiency and effective targeting

If you run your email campaigns from a third party service provider, there are usually two types of pricing:

1. Pay by the number of your subscribers on your lists
2. Pay by the number of emails sent

In any case, the bigger your list then you are paying more money to maintain it and send out email campaigns. If you have 100,000 subscribers but with only 10% of average open rate, compared with 50,000 subscribers with 20% open rate, you are probably already saving half of the operation costs.

What about if you send out the emails from your own server? Speaking from my own experience, hosting your own mailing list application takes a lot of resources. With every extra email you send out, you need to provide extra time for the spooling, server resources (CPU, memory), and bandwidth. Why doubling your hosting costs just to send out emails that will only end up at junk inboxes?

Building better trust relationship with your customer

Do you get annoyed by sales rep who is pushing you every single week with new product offers that you are not interested at all, even after you said no already? Do you prefer to deal with reps who can provide the information you need but allow you to think first before making a decision? The same rule with emails. By allowing them to decide when to receive or stop information from you, it builds better trust and respect from your customers.

In conclusion, I would like to state that you have more things to loose by not placing that unsubscribe link on your emails whether it is required by the local laws or not.

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